Purdue Scholar Tara Grillos Honored by APSA STEP & Trailblazer Program for Groundbreaking Work on Sustainable Development Policy

Dr. Tara Grillos, Associate Professor of Political Science at Purdue University, has been awarded the 2025 Emerging Scholar Award by the Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy (STEP) section of the American Political Science Association. The honor was presented at the STEP section business meeting during the 2025 APSA Annual Meeting in Vancouver, recognizing her as a researcher within ten years of her PhD whose work is making notable contributions to environmental and sustainable development policy. Last year, Grillos was named Purdue’s 2024 Trailblazer Award winner, a prestigious mid-career accolade that highlights faculty whose recent scholarship has already had significant impact. 

Grillos’s research centers on “the human dimensions of sustainable development policy,” focusing on comparative participatory institutions and how local governance arrangements affect environmental behavior, collective action, equity, and well-being in developing contexts. Her methodological toolkit blends experimental and quasi-experimental designs with fieldwork across several countries, including Kenya, Honduras, and Bolivia. Among her publications are “Participation Improves Collective Decisions (When It Involves Deliberation): Experimental Evidence from Kenya” (British Journal of Political Science, 2022); “Water Scarcity & Procedural Justice in Honduras: Community-Based Management Meets Market-Based Policy” (World Development, 2021); “Gender Quotas Increase Equality and Effectiveness of Climate Policy Interventions” (Nature Climate Change, 2019); and “Collective PES Contracts Can Motivate Institutional Creation to Conserve Forests: Experimental Evidence” (Conservation Letters, 2024). Her work has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, including a project examining decision-making and local public good provision in over 100 Kenyan communities that compares different participatory decision processes.

In addition to her individual scholarship, Dr. Grillos plays an important leadership role at Purdue as co-director of the Joe & Maggie Kernan Experimental Social Science Lab (also called JMK Social Sciences Lab), where she advances experimental social science research and helps train the next generation of political scientists in causal inference, experimental design, and policy-oriented scholarship. With these recognitions, Grillos is being celebrated not only for her rigorous empirical work, but for pushing forward collaborative, interdisciplinary, and applied scholarship that addresses critical global challenges.